---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 14 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/14/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 14. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/14/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

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> Title: Down and Out in Paris and London
Date of first publication: 1933
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Mar. 14, 2018
Date last updated: Mar. 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180314

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Down and Out_
    _in Paris and London_

> O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!
       CHAUCER

> PENGUIN BOOKS

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1933

> Copyright 1933 by Eric Blair

> [The end of _Down and Out in Paris and London_ by George Orwell]

## 14. Chapter XIV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/14/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/14/#p-N

[¶0] In a few days I had grasped the main principles on which the hotel was
run. The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into
the service quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and disorder
during the rush hours. It is something so different from the steady work
in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad
management. But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason
Hotel work is not particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in
rushes and cannot be economized. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak
two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, by
which time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then do it all
together, in frantic haste. The result is that at mealtimes everyone is
doing two men's work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling.
Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace
would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of
idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole
staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a
verb in the hotel except _foutre_. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen,
used oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say
'cursing like a scullion'? No doubt Shakespeare had watched scullions at
work.) But we were not losing our heads and wasting time; we were just
stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours' work into
two hours.

[¶1] What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine
pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the
others soon find him out, and conspire against him to get him sacked.
Cooks, waiters and _plongeurs_ differ greatly in outlook, but they are
all alike in being proud of their efficiency.

[¶2] Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the
cooks. They do not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is
higher and their employment steadier. The cook does not look upon
himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is generally called
'_un ouvrier_', which a waiter never is. He knows his power—knows that
he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late
everything is out of gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and
makes it a point of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And
he takes a genuine artistic pride in his work, which demands very great
skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but the doing
everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the
Hôtel X. would receive orders for several hundred dishes, all to be
served at different times; he cooked few of them himself, but he gave
instructions about all of them and inspected them before they were sent
up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned on a board, but
the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind,
and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out,
'_Faites marcher une côtelette de veau_' (or whatever it was)
unfailingly. He was an insufferable bully, but he was also an artist. It
is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in technique, that
men cooks are preferred to women.

[¶3] The waiter's outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of his
skill, but his skill is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him the
mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in
sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their
conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He
has the pleasure of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always
the chance that he may become rich himself, for, though most waiters die
poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally. At some cafes on the
Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the waiters
actually pay the _patron_ for their employment. The result is that
between constantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes
to identify himself to some extent with his employers. He will take
pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels that he is
participating in the meal himself.

[¶4] I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at Nice at which he had
once served, and of how it cost two hundred thousand francs and was
talked of for months afterwards. 'It was splendid, _mon p'tit, mais
magnifique_! Jesus Christ! The champagne, the silver, the orchids—I
have never seen anything like them, and I have seen some things. Ah, it
was glorious!'

[¶5] 'But,' I said, 'you were only there to wait?'

[¶6] 'Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid.'

[¶7] The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a
restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you
feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you.
But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, 'What an overfed
lout'; he is thinking, 'One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall
be able to imitate that man.' He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he
thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom
Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a
day—they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafés. They are
snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.

[¶8] The _plongeurs_, again, have a different outlook. Theirs is a job which
offers no prospects, is intensely exhausting, and at the same time has
not a trace of skill or interest; the sort of job that would always be
done by women if women were strong enough. All that is required of them
is to be constantly on the run, and to put up with long hours and a
stuffy atmosphere. They have no way of escaping from this life, for they
cannot save a penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a
hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for anything else. The
best they can hope is to find a slightly softer job as night-watchman or
lavatory attendant.

[¶9] And yet the _plongeurs_, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It
is the pride of the drudge—the man who is equal to no matter what
quantity of work. At that level, the mere power to go on working like an
ox is about the only virtue attainable. _Débrouillard_ is what every
_plongeur_ wants to be called. A _débrouillard_ is a man who, even when
he is told to do the impossible, will _se débrouiller_—get it done
somehow. One of the kitchen _plongeurs_ at the Hôtel X., a German, was
well known as a _débrouillard_. One night an English lord came to the
hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for
peaches, and there were none in stock; it was late at night, and the
shops would be shut. 'Leave it to me,' said the German. He went out, and
in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a
neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a
_débrouillard_. The English lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs
each.

[¶10] Mario, who was in charge of the _cafeterie_, had the typical drudge
mentality. All he thought of was getting through the '_boulot_', and he
defied you to give him too much of it. Fourteen years underground had
left him with about as much natural laziness as a piston rod. '_Faut
être un dur_,' he used to say when anyone complained. You will often
hear _plongeurs_ boast, '_Je suis un dur_'—as though they were
soldiers, not male charwomen.

[¶11] Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and when the press
of work came we were all ready for a grand concerted effort to get
through it. The constant war between the different departments also made
for efficiency, for everyone clung to his own privileges and tried to
stop the others idling and pilfering.

[¶12] This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge and complicated
machine is kept running by an inadequate staff, because every man has a
well-defined job and does it scrupulously. But there is a weak point,
and it is this—that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily what
the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good
service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the _boulot_—meaning,
as a rule, an imitation of good service. The result is that, though
hotels are miracles of punctuality, they are worse than the worst
private houses in the things that matter.

[¶13] Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hôtel X., as soon as one
penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting. Our _cafeterie_ had
year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested
with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario. 'Why
kill the poor animals?' he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I
wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean
where we recognized cleanliness as part of the _boulot_. We scrubbed the
tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do
that; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had
no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and as our first
duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.

[¶14] In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a
mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the
soup—that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist,
but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty
because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment.
When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook's
inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his
fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to
taste the gravy, runs it round and licks it again, then steps back and
contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then
presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of
which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied,
he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it
to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips _his_ fingers into the
gravy—his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through
his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for
a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in
this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same
trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan
and flung onto a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one
pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

[¶15] Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is
sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy
getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is
simply '_une commande_' to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply
'a case' to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of
toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to
prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, 'This toast is to be
eaten—I must make it eatable'? All he knows is that it must look right
and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from
his forehead onto the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast
falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new
piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs
the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs.
And so with everything. The only food at the Hôtel X. which was ever
prepared cleanly was the staff's, and the _patron_'s. The maxim,
repeated by everyone, was: 'Look out for the _patron_, and as for the
clients, _s'en fout pas mal_!' Everywhere in the service quarters dirt
festered—a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel
like the intestines through a man's body.

[¶16] Apart from the dirt, the _patron_ swindled the customers wholeheartedly.
For the most part the materials of the food were very bad, though the
cooks knew how to serve it up in style. The meat was at best ordinary,
and as to the vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at them
in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was diluted with milk.
The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic
stuff out of vast unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to
Boris, were corked _vin ordinaire_. There was a rule that employees must
pay for anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things were
seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third floor dropped a roast
chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter
of broken bread, torn paper and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped
it with a cloth and sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of
once-used sheets not being washed, but simply damped, ironed and put
back on the beds. The _patron_ was as mean to us as to the customers.
Throughout that vast hotel there was not, for instance, such a thing as
a brush and pan; one had to manage with a broom and a piece of
cardboard. And the staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there
was no place to wash one's hands, except the sinks used for washing
crockery.

[¶17] In spite of all this the Hôtel X. was one of the dozen most expensive
hotels in Paris, and the customers paid startling prices. The ordinary
charge for a night's lodging, not including breakfast, was two hundred
francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly double shop prices,
though of course the _patron_ bought at the wholesale price. If a
customer had a title, or was reputed to be a millionaire, all his
charges went up automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an
American who was on diet wanted only salt and hot water for his
breakfast. Valenti was furious. 'Jesus Christ!' he said, 'what about my
ten per cent? Ten per cent of salt and water!' And he charged
twenty-five francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a
murmur.

[¶18] According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels,
or at least in all the big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the
customers at the Hôtel X. were especially easy to swindle, for they were
mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English—no French—and seemed to
know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves with
disgusting American 'cereals', and eat marmalade at tea, and drink
vermouth after dinner, and order a _poulet à la reine_ at a hundred
francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer, from
Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled
eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are
swindled or not.